updated 06:40 pm EDT, Wed May 27, 2009

Ex Apple exec behind Pre

Former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein reportedly played a significant role in overhauling Palm's Pre project when he began working with the company, according to Fortune. Rubinstein initially started "hanging out" with the Palm teams in June of 2007. Taking a first look, he was unimpressed with the Pre hardware and pushed to have the engineers step away from the resistive touchscreens utilized on the prototypes. The components were replaced with capacitive touchscreens used in devices such as the iPhone.

Rubinstein scrapped the old hardware and pushed to have a new prototype finished in just 15 months. "We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it," he says.

The engineer's relationship with the Apple executives dates back to 1990, after being invited to join Steve Jobs' NeXT venture. Later, while working at Apple, Rubinstein lead engineers to bring the first iMacs and iPods to the market in extremely short time-frames.

After Elevation Partners proved unable to raise enough capital to buy Palm outright, the firm instead negotiated to purchase a smaller share and bring Rubinstein into the company. The noncompetition agreement with Apple expired in April of 2007, leaving the former executive free to take his experience elsewhere.

Palm anticipates that the Pre will restore its position as a formidable competitor in the smartphone business. Rubinstein was on hand to launch the device at CES in January. The first devices will be released on June 6th for $200 on Sprint.

Without competition, Apple would be subject, like Microsoft, to charges of being a monopoly.

You can't claim monopoly when there is so many competitors.

The iPod, for example, is the choice over over 80% of people when it comes to the MP3 Player Market. Yet there are tons and tons and tons of competitors - even from Microsoft. Thus, you can't say Apple has a monopoly on the MP3 Player Market.

All Apple has to do in a market is make the best product it can and let it compete in the open market. Since Apple is the clear innovator, it simply ends up having the most desirable product. And the product ends up dominating the market.

For example, the iPhone has only 8 percent of the cell phone market capable of surfing the web. Yet it totally dominates cell phone web surfing.

Being a monopoly is not illegal in the US. Abusing the monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering the market would be illegal (see DOJ vs. MS). iPod is de-facto monopoly in the portable medial player market space. However, Apple is not preventing others from entering the market (for example, by making some exclusive deals with Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, etc -- "you only sell iPods and nobody else"). If they did, they'd be abusing the monopoly position (again, see DOJ v. MS).

I can't help but wondering what happened to cause a split between Jon Rubenstein and Steve Jobs.

He probably got tired of having his designs be killed, shot-down, and/or modified by Steve Jobs, and wanted to actually go somewhere where his work would be either appreciated or at least not changed by the CEO. And at Palm, he can at least tell the guy "Oh yeah! And what do you know about design!"

What I think is more important here is that the innovation seen at Apple and greater yet, the overall design philosophy associated with Apple has to do with the Company's overall philosophy and not just Steve Jobs (albeit it's his brainchild). The Jon has been working to break the Palm corporation mentality and been pushing innovation. The first (and fast) evidence of this was the Palm Centro - this was clearly a stop gap, but it came with the right features and price leveraging Palms existing general hardware design and OS. The Pre really is the first phone that may truly offer some real competition for the iPhone, which is a good thing. Clearly the people you bring into a company matters, but so does the company's philosophy and culture. It means that Apple will continue to be Apple well after Steve Jobs is gone. I think Steve's biggest effort over the last couple of years has been to bring on the kind of people that are not only innovative, but are also capable of understanding the philosophy and hopefully maintain it into the future by hiring their replacements with the same abilities and talent.